Monday, December 17, 2007

Hughes Network Systems announced the successful on-orbit handover of the Spaceway 3 commercial communications satellite from Boeing. Hughes will utilize the Boeing-built satellite to provide HughesNet broadband satellite services throughout North America.

The Ka-band SPACEWAY 3 satellite is the world's first commercial satellite featuring an on-board traffic switching and routing capability. This ability to switch and route IP packets on board, enabling single-hop communications between any two satellite terminals and eliminating the need for the traffic to be routed through a central hub earth station.

Hughes has said that combined with a 10 Gbps overall capacity, fast packet switching, and dynamic beam forming, its SPACEWAY 3 satellite will usher in a new world of bandwidth-on-demand satellite services with true site-to-site, single-hop networking of high-performance ground terminals. As a full IP-based system, SPACEWAY supports a large variety of web, data, voice, and video services for both unicast and multicast applications in a standards-compliant fashion. SPACEWAY terminals also implement custom enhancement proxies for application acceleration using TCP and HTTP protocols.

SPACEWAY 3 was built by Boeing and is based on the company's 702 satellite platform.

"We are excited to accept the handover of Spaceway 3 and to begin our pre- commercial service testing," said Pradman Kaul, chairman and CEO of Hughes.